Dialogic Discourse Analysis (DDA) and Enunciation Theory: Illustrating dialogic tension in Chilean secondary school teachers' discourse

Abstract

Dialogical Discourse Analysis (DDA) is being steadily used in many domains of the Social Sciences. Fields such as Psychology and Education are currently employing concepts from DDA to deal with a variety of different research problems. In fact, in the field of educational studies there is an exhaustive attempt to study subjectivity in teachers' and students' discourses, and the role it plays in the construction of several professional identities through different voices. In the next few pages an explanation of the essence of this analysis and its theoretical roots is offered. There is also an attempt to establish the linguistic basis of several conceptual tools that may be used to perform such an analysis. Then, by means of the actual use of the analysis on two discourses taken from a larger sample of interviews with Chilean high-school Spanish Language teachers, the notions of tension and dialogical movement are introduced. Finally, the last section includes a discussion about the epistemological importance of DDA and its possible use as a research method in the Social Sciences.